RIP Intel: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU Review & Benchmarks (Workstation, Gaming, Overclocking)

amd cpu reviews are starting to feel a little bit like nvidia gp reviews where there's not really that much competition present yet on the gpu side and so at some point you kind of look at the charts and you go we should put something from intel on here just so it doesn't look like we've forgotten about them so that's kind of the direction this is going with zen 3 especially and even more so when looking at the 5950x which is the cpu we're reviewing in this video we'll be reviewing all four of the cpus coming out today in one day they'll be spread out across couple hours each so uh over the next 24 hours you'll see the 5900x review 5600x review 5800x review 5950x is this one that's the 16 core 32 thread cpu and we'll be looking at frequency boosting behavior some of the thermal frequency response power consumption metrics and then of course usual production workloads so rendering code compile compression decompression ffmpeg transcodes photoshop stuff like that and gaming which is actually a fairly large point in the zen 3 marketing campaign amd says it's picked up in the gaming performance so we'll certainly be focusing on that before that this video is brought to you by us and the brand new gn bar runner bar mat on store.gamersnexus.net the new gn bar mat features a fully custom rubber mold showing computer electronics in the form of a rubber spill guard you'll find vrm components like capacitors inductors resistors with detail as small as half-height legs ram slots and even cpu socket pins colored gold except you can actually spill water in the spill proof easily washable socket the 610 by 127 by eight millimeter gn bar runner is for use with drinks by your keyboard at your home bar in your garage workshop buy the dishwasher or sink for drying glasses or just as a cool decoration we wanted to make the best possible version of a bar mat and put huge emphasis on attention to detail painstakingly designing every component and blender for our custom mold this barmat spill guard is perfect for pc and electronics enthusiasts who want a truly unique product to represent the hobby purchases directly fund our goal to buy thermal and acoustic chambers in the future so go to store.gamersnexus.net to buy one today they're in stock and shipping now quick recap of the basics in case you missed it the 5950x is an 800 cpu it's a replacement for the 3950x which msrp was 750 and later it dropped to 700. the 5900x is a 550 cpu that is replacing the 3900x which recently was about 400 with the xt launch but originally it was about 500 and then there's a 5600 x which is sort of a 3600x replacement except in actuality it's a 3600 replacement because nobody bought the excuse of the cpus compared to the volume of the non-x cpus we know we have amazon data we can see it and the reason amd launched them the way they did with only a 5600x only a 5800x and no non-excuse for those is because well no one said they wanted the excuse in the original 3000 2000 1000 series so amd just made one and then that's the one you have to buy so there's been a little bit of price creep we'll talk about that more as we get down lower in the stack at the higher end of the stack when you're talking 800 versus 750 for the type of buyer looking at a 5950x cpu that's not as big of a difference especially when considering the fact that there's not a ton of direct intel competition the 10980xe is about the closest thing to 100 ahead of it but that's he cpu territory and it's 200 ahead so we're going to review this thing today the full specs can be found in the original news piece that we did for the andy 5000 series cpus we're not going to read you the spec brochure in this one so you can go check that for that data and let's start off with the 5950x and frequency behavior then we'll walk through all the production and gaming benchmarks with a focus first on production since this is a workstation class cpu in a desktop class platform we'll start by validating frequency behavior with both blender all core and cinebench single core workloads this is important because we need to validate that the cpu is actually behaving like it's supposed to and that there's no motherboard trickery going on that could screw the results and boost things unexpectedly or tank them unexpectedly amd oddly tries to assert in its review materials that all core frequency doesn't exist anymore but at the end of the day they're full of it and it still does it's the intent of the phrasing that matters and there's still an effective average all-core frequency in an all-core workload like blender in this blender all core workload we've intentionally zoomed in the scale to make the frequency more visible the average all-core frequency of the 5950x is about 39.77 megahertz for the first 200 seconds then about 39.67 megahertz for the next 200 seconds and then about 39.50 megahertz for the final stretch this gradual frequency decay is expected behavior from precision boost 2 and again that is explicitly not pbo which is different and not stock behavior pb2 is stock behavior and this is normal it's contingent upon thermals which is what we're seeing here the fastest single thread at any given interval was typically about 60 to 100 megahertz higher than the all core average to really teach and show everyone why the frequency boosts in this matter we wanted to plot the temperature chart as a counter to the frequency every couple degrees on ryzen cpus is worth a few more megahertz as we've shown in the past that's true with nvidia gpus as well here the frequency falls about 10 megahertz across a 3 degree range we should also point out that sustained longer workloads are also more likely to slowly settle into a lower frequency than their initial couple of seconds or maybe up to about 50 seconds or so depending on the cpu they'll eventually level out and again this is expected behavior for the cpu in this one we're looking at cinebench single core boosting at any given interval throughout the test we measure a maximum single core frequency per interval and that maximum here is 50 50.4 megahertz this is beyond the advertised specifications of the amd r95950x and we actually messaged amd as a result we were concerned that the behavior might not be expected and we were worried that there might be some new sneaky motherboard behavior changing the stock performance of the cpu ultimately we learned that no this is in fact expected for the cpu and yes we did correctly disable any such features and run it properly stock amd has had some staff changes since the last generation and now the company is more accurately marketing its products and sticking to the lower of the achievable numbers from silicon each ryzen cpu has a silicon fitness attribute and that silicon fitness quality or silicon quality will dictate this boosting behavior and these marketed specs are meant to be in at least this time not and at most and maybe sometimes if you live in fantasyland so our cpu is perhaps of the higher silicon quality chips from its 50 50 megahertz single core boosting frequencies this is a very strong start for amd and just for reference we'll also plot the amd r9 3950x from the previous generation of this class of cpu that one maxed out at about 4 700 megahertz for the highest single core per interval you can ignore the dip in the middle that's part of the standard testing procedure and is not a result of some weird cpu behavior we're seeing roughly a 350 megahertz increase in single core boosting going from the 3950 to the 5950x moving on to production benchmarks our first one is v-ray which like blender is another application that benefits from tile-based rendering performance the 5950x held 4.7 gigahertz in this one for all core marking the primary new detail the 5950x oc improved 13 percent over the stock 5950x score while the stock of the sdx outperformed the stock 3950x by 22 percent and the 10 900k stock by 73 just for an older baseline the 2700x did 12 432 points at half the core account of the 5950x allowing the x elite of 151 percent so clearly there's a benefit just beyond direct core scaling as we all expected the entries marked with two asterisks are from older test data from a few months ago but they're still accurate we observed under a two percent change from the fresh tests versus the old data so we've added in these tests as reference points because we didn't run every single cpu again the 10980xe scored 27 969 points granting the 5950x stock cpu a lead of 12 the 3950x at 4.3 gigahertz all core allowed a similar lead as for the 39 90 x 64 core cpu that's still 150 ahead of the 5950x stock cpu at the top of the charts with the 3970x plotting 47 of the 5950x and in between the two photoshop has historically been an intel strong point as the application still leverages one thread enough to allow intel to pull ahead in many price to price category this testing looks at filters transforms scales photo merges compression and other effects and the 5950x ranked 1373 points when stock with a reduction in rank when overclocked this alone is significant in that it shows photoshop's behavior hasn't changed too much it still favors high frequency single threaded performance and so an all core oc with a lower overall single core frequency than a boosted frequency will hinder that if applied via a simple multiplier still the larger takeaway is that the 5950x stock cpu is outperforming the intel i9 10900k even at 5.2 gigahertz with our overclock intel has fully seated its crown here and it is intel giving that away they've had enough time although it's losing to a more expensive part you'll see this trend continue in our other tests too once we get to the 5900x in one of the next videos versus the 3950x the 5950x stock cpu has improved a staggering 21 this huge gain is realized from amd's ipc improvements this generation coupled with frequency improvements you won't see this in many other production benchmarks because most the other ones aren't this heavy on a single threat so amd is finally starting to post some serious gains in those hanaron applications where single thread is still massively important 7-zip compression is next measured in millions of instructions per second or mips the 5950x stock cpu completed 132k mips out during the 3950x stock cpu is 115k mips by 15 the same 15 percent lead is shown against the 1090 dxe's data from last round the e5950x 4.7 gigahertz all core oc did almost nothing for it but a memory upgrade not shown here did help you'll have to check back shortly for that data the 3900x did about 101k mips stock with a 10900k stock at 86k mips to fully illustrate that top performers especially amd's top of the line become memory bound on this test we can refer you to the 3990x and 3970x from the last round of tests at the top these two tied in compression and would need faster memory to realize any cork out difference decompression is next the 5950x stock cpu completed 219k mips but as you'll see in a video soon faster memory doesn't much benefit the cpus in decompression the 5950xl core oc did help and boosted the score by eight percent to 237k mips the 10980xe gets left far behind here out doing the 3900x and below only another point of interest here the 3950x and 5950x outpace the 1090 exe more significantly in decompression than they did in compression with the hierarchy shuffling around it a bit our second production benchmark will be blender which is one of the most popular 3d modeling and animation tools available we use blender internally for product design like for our brand new gn bar owner bar mats where we made 3d models in blender prior to manufacturing the mold and you can find those on store.camerasnexus.net our blender benchmarks use our own scenes that we built specifically to stress cpus based on experience using the application ourselves the gm logo render test is first which is the most intensive of the workload in this one the amd r95950x is currently chart leader as we haven't rerun the workstation class cpus like threadripper the 10980xe would fall below the 5950x how do we recently rerun it the 5950x was unfortunately unable to sustain the 4.7 gigahertz all-core oc for blender despite holding it in most of the other tests so at 4.6 gigahertz all core it completed the test in 8.1 minutes which is an improvement over the stock 9.4 minutes of 14 that's actually a meaningful overclock on an amd cpu for once so that's an exciting start the 3950x stock cpu completed this test in about 9.9 minutes marking the 5950x stock as about 5 improved for reference our 3950x 4.3 gigahertz oc gets it a 10 reduction of this test so it would plot about 10.89 minutes if we were to rerun it the 10900k stocks view did this in 17 minutes allowing the 5950x cpu a lead of 81 intel doesn't have much of a direct desktop class competitor right now and even at the high end the 10 series extreme chips barely ever hit the market and they don't compete here anyway in the monkey head test the r950x stock cpu required about 7.9 minutes to complete improved 15 with the 4.6 gigahertz all core oc the 5950x stock cpu improved by 10 over the 3950x stock cpu and 29 over the 3900x and 44 over the 10 900k stock we've replaced handbrake due to limitations on implementation of the x265 encoder where scaling on high core count cpus fell off significantly we're still testing on h.264 to h.265 transcode though using the same video file but we're now using a pre-built 64-bit version of ffmpeg instead that we've tuned to make this work we found this to be subject to the same limitations so now we're doing two tests one of them is a single pass on the slow preset with some other settings tuned for the benchmark and then for test two we launched three simultaneous instances of ffmpeg doing the same task which is enough to saturate all cores on desktop cpus the number reported is the duration required in minutes to complete all three simultaneous tasks for that simultaneous benchmark dealing with a single file is relatively easy the r7 2700x sets the floor at 42 minutes for this test with the 10700k and 3700x alike offering roughly a 33 reduction time required from this one the 3950x required 19.6 minutes and the 5950x improved over that by 17 switching over to ffmpeg and the three times file test we see it starts to fall apart on the more core limited cpus like the 2700x this one took 112 minutes this time about triple the time required linearly scaling to finish three files 5950x however maintained a 36 minute completion time requiring about a 120 percent increase over a single file that's positive scaling here for the higher core count cpu code compile is next the 5950x required about 46 minutes to compile chromium with our test setup which has the 3970x and its 32 cores at 32 less time than the 5950x the 5950x improved over the 3950x by 8 percent over the 1090 dxe's 55 minute result by 16 and over the 10 900k stock by 43 time to get into game testing all of this testing uses completely new data and is moved to an evga rtx 3080 ftw3 from the 2080 ti previously we'll start with reintroducing civilization vi and the turntime benchmarks which look at time and seconds to complete a turn measured against 20 total turns this has historically been an intel favorite benchmark as it's relatively dependent on ipc the amd r95950x opens at 26.6 seconds average turn completion time besting the intel 10900k at 5.2 gigahertz at 9 less time required an extra three seconds might not sound like a ton but multiply that against each ai player before you get to play and then remember that increasing complexity in longer games will increase the turn time the 10600k at five gigahertz does okay here at 32 seconds and is better value than the 10900k that said its real competitor would be the 5600x which we'll be looking at later today the 5950xoc marginally helped but not in a way which is really visible past one decimal point so you might as well run it stock for a game like this in red dead redemption 2 we measured the 10 900k stock cpu at 177 fps average with an overclock and marginally improving performance the lows were 115 and 105 which is relatively proportional against the average the 5950x stock cpu ran about 168fps average stock and overclocked allowing the 10900k stock cpu a lead of about 5.4 percent the 5950x has disproportionately less consistent frame times here as well represented by the lower lows but not in a way which is stuttery or particularly noticeable as a player intel has an objective advantage here but as with the past few generations it's diminishing and how noticeable it is the 3950x ran this game at 149 fps average which means that the 5950x improved over last gen for this particular game by about 13 percent in a fully cheap you constrain scenario with high settings the same benchmark truncated the stack but left the hierarchy mostly untouched the 10900k still leads the 5950x stock cpu by about four percent down from 5.4 percent the total war 3 kingdom's battle benchmark is up now the amd r9 5950x stock cpu ran 206 fps average with the overclock not advancing the numbers meaningfully lows were 146 and 127 which are fine the intel i9 10900k at 5.2 gigahertz ran at 195 fps average allowing the 5950x a lead of 5.9 percent remember most games don't actually use those extra cores over the 5900x or 5800x in a way that produces benefit so this performance should scale down to the other and the cpus as well and still retain most of the positive advancements you'll see those other amd reviews shortly on this channel so make sure you subscribe and check back throughout the day to catch them the 10600k still provides good value although we don't see benefit from a 5 gigahertz overclock here our 5.1 overclock often provides about 1 fps advantage in this game so not particularly useful for the total war benchmarks compared to the 3950x the 5950x stock cpu improved 25 for the three kingdoms battle benchmark at 1080p at 1440p the chart becomes truncated as a result of the increased gpu load the 5950x stock cpu and the overclock were within test variants both at about 138 fps average the 3950x also ran 137 fps average and the 10900k is stuck at about 131 fps average the entire stack here is hitting gpu limitations at some point during the past and so it does mostly invalidate the data as being useful for determining a difference between cpu performance that said the 5950x does have a technical lead here where historically that would have been intel in that position the division 2 is next the m50x stock cpu performed at about 241 fps average with an overclock not hurting but not helping the 10 900k stock cpu ran 218 fps with an oc at 226 fps average the lows are proportional in all of these results thus far the 5950x stock holds a 10 lead over the 10 900k stock with the 5950 xoc about seven percent ahead of the 10 900 koc results we haven't yet rerun the 395 dx in this game due to time but the 3900x was at about 193 fps average for points of reference in shadow of the tomb raider the amd r9 5950x stock cpu ran about 203 fps average with its overclock actually proving beneficial and boosting an additional 5.2 percent the 10 900k held 195 to 198 fps average resulting in a 4.3 advantage that favors the 5950x in stock to stock performance compared to the 3950x the 5950 has improved by 32 percent in average frame rate for this title with lows also getting dragged up alongside it f1 2020 is another game that has shown disproportionately high focus on frequency and ipc as with all the other f1 games this game runs so easily on gpus that we're in the hundreds of fps territory but scaling is still predictable the 5950x stock performance outdid intel's 10900k stock and oc numbers by about nine percent and out did the 3950x by about 36 percent if you want a baseline against the 2000 series the 2700x is down at a measly 199 fps average clearly this is utterly unplayable and our consumerist urge should overcome all senses at this point the 5950x made major inroads here to top these charts and that in all seriousness is a total change from the last generation the 10 900k last time held a lead over the 3950x by about 24 as still seen here so this is a big switch up for amd we're gonna stop there for gaming benchmarks for now we've established a pattern the 5950x is clearly doing well here and we'll leave more games for the 5600x review which is more gaming targeted we allocated more time in this one for the production workloads instead given the nature of the 5950x power testing is up now we conduct all power benchmarks at the eps 12 volt cables and not at the wall so our numbers give you a fairly accurate depiction of cpu-only power for the most part you can linearly combine this with our gpu power numbers to get an approximate total system power requirement if assuming 100 load scenarios starting with a long-term bench and blender passed intel tower expiry this plots the 10900k stock cpu at about 130 watts the 3900x here is at 150 watts and the 3950x is at 138 watts this is not a mistake note that because the power is obviously derived from the voltage the 3950x and its operating voltage is lower as the silicon quality is higher as for the new 5950x that measured at about 120 watts in the same workload 5950x has dropped about 18 watts half of our 3950x's numbers in the previous testing which is a meaningful reduction in power and thus a reduction in cooling requirements similarly you could think of this as meaning given equivalent cooling power between the 3950 and 5950x the 5950x could theoretically achieve roughly equivalent thermals at lower noise levels overclocked to 4.7 gigahertz and with a 1.275 volts get for v core voltage the 5950x pulled about 253 watts of the blender run the efficiency is completely out the window at this point and our arctic liquid freezer 2 280 is completely maxed out we had zero more room for additional increases in voltage or frequency if we push this thing any higher it would either follow some kind of throttling or would just crash so this is the limit of what our cpu can do with our standardized 280 cooler cinebench power is taken prior to tower expiry and sooner in the workloads the numbers shift a little bit for intel the change is primarily in something like the 10 900k where within the first 52 seconds of a workload we see it pulling 200 watts on our board up from 130 watts in the post however expiry testing that's only for the tower window again which is under a minute 3950x remains at 138 watts 5950x remains at 120 watts the overclocked 51 950x is about the same at 256 watts finally here's a look at the single core cinebench r20 workload in this one the 5950x stock cpu pulled out 40 watts under a single core workload while the 10900k stocked at about 32 watts the real reason we're showing this charge is the overclock though you can see that our manual tune ran 31 watts and this is a good reminder of a few things one the frequency is lower in a single core workload with an all-core oc than with the stock settings which means performance will be worse than this test two it's possible to tune a stable v core below what a motherboard might automatically configure which will impact power requirements of course here it's not boosting at all so that'd be the main difference conclusions then definitely there's been price creep obviously in the 5950x since that's one we're talking about in this video it seems like amd feels like it's been able to get away with that price creep because what are you going to do about it what are you going to buy intel because it's kind of that territory where again it's like an nvidia gpu review nvidia for the last though over a year now has been looking at the market going what are you going to do about it and by the way here's the rtx 3000 cards and uh if you want to see an amd card on the charts you basically have to look for a 5700 xt because there's nothing else that's close to those now and these in that position where we're pulling up old data from a 109.80xe for a couple charts just because well the 1090dxe is technically the competitor to the 5950x but nobody is actually buying it right now at least not that many people it does have its upsides like overclocking for example but the 10980xe was never particularly available as an in stock to begin with and we'll see how this launch goes and it also uh was basically instantly killed by the 3950x except for in a few key applications the 5950x has effectively determined that the 1098xe has no territory left where it can meaningfully compete for most people overclocking sure there's a little bit there but we'll see once we get to our overclocking live streams the 5950x if the 10980 can even hold on in that territory especially with pcie gen4 advantage where even one percent extra performance means something when you're talking competitive overclocking whereas it might not in just gaming so then the 5950x ipc gains are real they are realized in some workstation applications but primarily and most heavily in games where in some games across the four cpus we're reviewing today we've seen uplift approaching 40 versus the previous generation and you'll see some of that in the 5 900 and 3900 x reviews whether or not it's worth buying of course depends on if you're happy with your current system if it's doing what you like and you haven't really felt a need to upgrade then well don't bother just wait but if you're unhappy with current system performance and let's say you're on maybe a 2700 x uh 1700 or 700k something like that this is probably a good launch to look at for an upgrade option especially if you're interested in improving specifically on the gaming side of things if you didn't want to buy ryzen because you only do workstation applications like premiere sometimes and gaming the rest of the time now there's really nothing left that intel is handing on to red dead two that was about the only instance where we saw intel technically still in a lead class for class so it's embarrassing embarrassing is the right word for intel right now uh where we're putting additional intel cpus on a chart just like we're putting additional amd gpus on a chart just so that people can see there is in fact another company that makes this component not particularly competitively right now but it's out there one major takeaway for the cpu the 5950x is that you still shouldn't be buying this for a gaming only system it's not going to make sense some of these games you're looking at basically error for the differences save that for the lower end amd cpus and will help you pick between the 59 58 and 5600 x's in the next couple of videos but 5950x should be reserved for basically workstation tasks where you aren't as memory restricted if you need more capacity or more bandwidth probably wait for threadripper but if not and you just need the cores for cheap and you don't need the pcie lanes afforded by the quote-unquote cheaper threader for parts then the 5950x makes sense in those scenarios so that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe to catch the additional reviews coming up asap they'll all be live today and we'll have follow-up coverage as well including 3600 megahertz memory testing for those of you curious about that angle of things you can go to store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like to support us directly for example by buying one of our gn bar runner bar mats that just launched about a week ago these things are awesome have been selling really well so thank you for the support and you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus we'll see you on the next one foreign

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 675,773

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, amd ryzen 9 5950x cpu review, amd r9 5950x benchmarks, amd ryzen 9 5950 x, amd 5950x cpu, amd r9 5950x review, amd r9 5900x vs 5950x, amd r9 3950x vs 5950x, amd r9 5950x worth it, amd r9 5950x vs 5600x, amd ryzen 5 5600x, amd r7 5800x, amd r9 5900x, amd r5 5600x review, intel vs amd, intel 10900k vs r9 5950x

Id: 72AHENDeTEI

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/masterchief99]

My rule is that if a CPU can win as the best in GN's benchmarks overall then yes it is the best. I admittedly don't really expect this level of performance from Zen 3 but whoa mama I wish I bought a cheaper 3600 or a Zen+ to justify an upgrade to a 5900X lol. Perhaps when it's cheaper though

[u/SackityPack]

Good to see advertised boost clocks are minimums during a sustained workload, not like the millisecond blips on Zen2.

[u/SpacevsGravity]

Need 5600x reviews

[u/OftenSarcastic]

That Civ6 turn time!

[u/JameliusAntholius]

Goddamn, it maxed out the Liquid Freezer II 280. Crazy.

[u/Jeffy29]

"What you gonna do about it (about the price increase), buy Intel?" 🥴

When your only hope to lower prices is Intel. 😑

Btw I got 5950X! The initial stock seems to be decent (Czech store Alza), after 25 minutes only 5900X is sold out. The page showed that about 20k were looking at the CPUs (10x higher number than Ampere, but Alza seems to be the only czech store that has Ryzen 5000 on launch day). In comparison on Ampere launch day I tried to buy the moment it was launched and it was sold out before I was able to click buy lmao.

edit: 5950x is sold out 35min after launch.

edit: Aaaand it's gone! Everything sold out. Given how many people were checking the page 30 minutes of all CPUs being in stock probably means 5-15k CPUs for our market, which is a lot. MLID saying there will be over 1mil units on launch day seems very realistic. Also before 5950X was confirmed the order message said "expecting November 10th", which means they'll be restocking fairly quickly. No Ampere stock issues.

[u/Zouba64]

Damn when Steve makes claims like that in the thumbnail you know he’s got the goods to back it up.

[u/Rondaru]

Am I the only one who skips immediately forward to some FPS comparison chart and then skips directly to the conclusion segment?

[u/princetacotuesday]

Holy piss AMD topping out 5.2ghz intel chips at stock!

That's just bonkers right there man!

Can't wait to see the comparison gaming benches for the 5900x...